Tic-Tac-Bacon

Due to real life setting in, the developer has put the App-A-Day project on temporary hiatus. I think this is a good thing, as it will hopefully give him time to reconsider where he's really going with this. Maybe you'll agree with me after reading my review of his latest effort, Ultimate Dungeon.

Now from the name you're probably thinking this is some boring programmer's game or an insect variation of "Where's Waldo?". In actuality it's an interesting take on the match 3 genre. Unfortunately, like most of the games in this series to date, it suffers from inadequate controls and hasty implementation. Here we go again...

Ready for some demon squishing fun? I was too, but what could have been a simple yet intriguing premise somehow managed to get mired in the details. Trounce is a good foundation for a nice pick-up-and-play game, but until it can move past its App-A-Day roots it really feels like little more than a prototype.

Another day, another application that's actually better than the last. This time around I'll be looking at Tumblecaps, a somewhat original take on the whole match 3 genre. I must confess that I probably have a bit of a soft spot for this game simply because I love match 3 games, but I think if you were to play all of the games up to this point you would agree that this is the most solid entry (Pegburner is a close second, but all the problems I had with unresponsive controls sets it back a bit from this one).

If you read my first two posts in this series, you might be wondering why I'm continuing to review these games. Besides the fact that the developer was kind enough to provide me with the first five games for these reviews, it turns out they're actually getting better. The next game in the series is Pegburner, and it's a simple "click the numbers in order" game. I was actually a bit relieved, because given then name I thought it was going to be another one of those peg jumping games.

Last time I talked about Tic-Tac-Bacon, an odd variant of a classic children's game. Today's piece is on a game called GardenGrow. According to the developer's blog, this game was inspired by his girlfriend. Makes sense, I suppose, because I couldn't see too many guys designing a simple gardening game on their own accord. After all, we like to kill things with big guns, right? Anyway, I do have to give this game credit for one thing: it's better than Tic-Tac-Bacon. Sadly, not by much. The game starts off with a similar loading time to TTB, though I think it's a bit faster. Once the game's ready you get a splash screen explaining that you are to use music to make the plants grow, and there's a nice big Begin button in the middle of the screen. Press start and you're off... to a screen with grass and some colored buttons at the bottom. It turns out that if you press those buttons, they make music!

In my increasingly sickening quest to assimilate all games iPhone, I ran across an interesting web site: the App-A-Day Project. The original directive of this project was that the developer was literally going to release a project each day (by 11:59 pm) to the App Store for 30 days. As happens with most projects like this, the developer has simmered down a bit. The new goal is to take the equivalent of a day's worth of work (4-5 hours) to complete each project, though an individual project might not necessarily be coded all in one day. The concept intrigued me, and the developer offered promo codes to anyone wanting to cover the games, so I figured "why not?" I will do my best to cover the games in the proper order, but given his new philosophy of spanning certain games over more than one day, there may not be a proper order to everything. At any rate, the first game that I'm going to cover in this series is Tic-Tac-Bacon.